


Identity [translation]

by SmilingNerdyCat



Series: some translations i guess [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Fluff, Gen, Hogwarts Eighth Year, M/M, Self-Esteem Issues, classmates to lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-13
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:54:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23637895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SmilingNerdyCat/pseuds/SmilingNerdyCat
Summary: Professor Johnson asks the eighth years to respond to a simple question: Who am I? The war and its consequences make this question not so simple for Harry and Draco.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter
Series: some translations i guess [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1663660
Kudos: 70





	1. Draco

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [Identidad](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22754662) by [ununquadius](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ununquadius/pseuds/ununquadius). 



> ununquadius: 
> 
> I began this fic a few months ago, and I finished it a month ago and now, finally, I posting it here. Thanks so much Ellis for reading it and OTPShipper 98 for organizing the Drarry in Spanish fest that was what made me write this fic (although I didn't finish it in time for the fest, oops)
> 
> I hope that you like it!

Who am I?

That was the question with which Professor Johnson, who taught the new subject required for all the eighth years, decided to start the class. According to her, before they could begin to reflect on the war, tolerance, and other questions around this subject, they all had to get to know themselves, discover the characteristics that made them different from everyone else, basically they had to analyze who they were. 

Draco reread the question for the umpteenth time. How can two simple words be so complicated? The other fifteen eighth year students seemed to be having the same difficulties as he was--except for Granger, who was leaning over her parchment scribbling rapidly. She had ink on her cheek. Draco rolled his eyes at her and began to think. 

Who was Draco? When he was little, he had been very proud of his identity. He was a wizard, and thus better than the rest of Great Britain and the world. He was capable of doing whatever he wished with only a mumbled phrase. Now, however, in the world after the war, he couldn’t even do magic freely--a silver bracelet that curled around his left wrist prevented it outside of the school schedule and from Hogwarts. Was he even a wizard anymore? 

Before he had felt special to belong to a pureblood family. His blood--free from the stain of mixed blood---was better than the rest, including that of other witches and wizards. His blood granted him a special place in the world. But now....now he understood that that was something stupid, to base his own existance and the vaule in something so absurd came with absurd prejudices as well and in the end...in the end everything culminated in bloodshed, bodies and broken souls. Without the protection that his blood status offered him, he was only a boy scared of the horror surrounding him. 

He clung to the last thing that he could. Above being a wizard and a pureblood, he was a Malfoy. The Malfoys were an ancient and powerful family, but that barely mattered to Draco. For him, to be a Malfoy meant exquisite meals at the dining room’s grand table, inventing stories with his mother in the garden, or playing Quidditch with her (a secret that did not leave the walls of the manor), following his father all around the house, talking about anything that crossed their minds.  
He tried to angle himself so that Susan Bones, sitting at the desk to his side, couldn’t see the tears that ran down his cheeks. But he wasn’t sure he managed. 

Nowadays, to be a Malfoy meant living in a cemetery of a once a beautiful house. It meant that the little stories he invented sounded out of place in the grim world of the gardens and his mother’s mind. It meant only communicating with his father in the letter that he was permitted to write once a month and knowing that the guards of Azkaban read it before giving it to him. 

To be Draco Malfoy didn’t mean anything in the world after the war. To be himself was deplorable, it was an error. How was he going to answer Johnson’s question?

The words that the Prophet had used to describe him come to mind, their incendiary articles, criticising the decision of the Wizegamot to not send him to a cell in Azkaban.

Death Eater. 

Assassin. 

But he wasn’t that. The brand that darkened his left forearm was not the full truth: that Death Eater Draco had too much to hope for. He wasn’t an assassin either. He was many terrible things, but that no. 

Carefully, with elegant and meticulous penmanship, Draco answered the question. 

No one.


	2. Harry

Harry looked at his desperate surroundings. After the first minutes of confusion when Professor Johnson threw the question at them, his peers had begun to write. All but two. Malfoy, like Harry, was looking around at the others as if waiting for someone to tell him the answer. 

Who am I?

How is he supposed to respond to something like that? Maybe Dumbledore would have known how to give a brilliant answer, but not Harry. 

He thought about the newspaper and magazine articles that have analyzed his appearance, his actions, his preferences and his relationships to the limit.

The Boy Who Lived. 

The Chosen One. 

The Savior. 

Our Hero.

But none of those titles defined the boy that grew up in a cupboard under the stairs in a house in Surrey.  
Harry started thinking about that boy again, the boy that he was before a new world opened its doors to him and then made him into a weapon to defeat the darkest wizard in recent years. Then, no one thought of him as a hero, not the chosen one, the savior of no one. Back then he was only the scrawny, bespectacled boy that his classmates looked down upon.

In the background he continued to be that boy, even though he didn’t sleep in a cupboard and now had some incredible friends. He smiled at the memory of the day that he met Ron and Hermione. He was so happy, so excited….

But the excitement over the magical world hadn’t lasted long, or at least, it had soon been tainted by the constant threat of Voldemort. Dumbledore had seen Harry as a pawn in the war, nothing more than a chess piece, essential to win, yes, but only when he was sacrificed in order to move the enemy to the right square. Was that the definition of Harry? A piece in the game of war?

To Sirius he was sure that he had meant a lot more. With his godfather, he had found out what it felt like to have a father figure, someone older, more experienced, someone to fall back on when something went wrong. However, he also suspected that Sirius saw him as the only thing linking him to James, and in his lowest moments he thought that that was the only reason Sirius cared about him. 

He shook his head to get rid of those thoughts. Who was he? He didn’t feel like a hero, and he didn’t believe that he was just a pawn or the younger image of James. He was all of that and more. He was also someone that liked Quidditch and eating treacle tart. Would this serve to answer Johnson’s question? He suspected not.  
He snorted and went back to looking at his peers. Malfoy was still not writing; Hermione was writing at such a speed that it seemed like she would run out of parchment very soon and Ron’s parchment had some blotted out words that Harry did not try to read. 

He thought that if he traded parchment with Ron, the work would be much easier. He could write meters of parchment about Ron. Or even he could trade parchment with Malfoy. He was sure that he could explain in detail who Draco was if he tried. But Harry...who was Harry?

He went back to thinking about the boy who lived in a cupboard and that dreamt about a lost family that would rescue him. He wasn’t a hero like the newspapers believed. He wasn’t a laugh or a strategic genius like Ron. He wasn’t intelligent like Hermione. He wasn’t tall and handsome like Malfoy. He was only Harry. And that was what he wrote. 

Just Harry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Leave me a comment and tell me what you think, if you like.


	3. Epilogue

The late light of the sunset washed over the Hogwarts grounds. The lake looked like an enormous, smooth, gold plate and the grass rustled in the warm breeze of the beginnings of summer. Under one of the trees located on the eastern bank of the lake, Harry absentmindedly stroked Draco’s hair. 

“Mmm, I love it when you do that.”

“You’re like a spoiled cat. You’re even purring!” Harry looked with care at how Draco slept using Harry as a pillow, totally relaxed while a hang played with the lawn. “If you think about it, there’s really no difference between you and a cat.”

“Ha. I don’t think that a cat would have the patience to put up with you.” Draco’s lips curved into a smile. He adjusted his head against Harry’s chest and closed his eyes. 

Harry stuck out his tongue and continued stroking his hair. 

The school year was almost finished, and soon they would deal with the uncertainty of the future, but for now, the future could wait.

Many things had changed since the beginning of the year, and one of them was the relationship that had grown between them. 

It had started little by little, first with a watered-down version of their old rivalry, then with a friendship, and finally, they had seen that they were pulled to each other like magnets. For the first time in his life, Harry felt complete and happy. There was nothing that threatened his happiness and even the panic attacks and nightmares were better now with Draco’s support. He could trust him like he trusted Run and Hermione. 

“Do you remember Johnson’s question at the beginning of the year?” Draco asked suddenly, with eyes still closed, “When we had to say who we were. Do you remember?”

“Yes. I put that I just was Harry. What did you answer?”

Professor Johnson had collected the parchment and called them one by one to comment on their answers, but none of them had shared with the rest of the group. With time, Harry had forgotten about this, even though at the beginning he had been very curious to know what the others had said. 

“Just Harry?” Draco opened his eyes to be able to see him with that look of his that Harry get when Draco wanted to call him an idiot. “What kind of shitty response is that, Potter?”

“What that….I’m only Harry. I wasn’t going to put that I am the famous Boy Who Lived or some other nonsense, right?”

Draco rolled his eyes. 

“Just Harry,” he said. “Self-esteem isn’t your thing I guess?”

“That’s what Johnson said to me, that I was much more than ‘just’ me and I don’t know what other nonsense, but.... you know? I am just me, not everything that they say in the Prophet or that people say. I don’t think that I have no self-esteem. What did you put for it?

Draco, who had opened his mouth to protest when Harry said that he didn’t have a self-esteem problem, closed it suddenly and sat up, approaching the bank of the lake, where he threw the handful of grass that he still had in his hand. 

“Nothing.”

“Oh, come on! I told you mine. I’m not going to tell anyone,” Harry stood as well and walked toward him. He tried to put on an innocent and angelic expression and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Please.”

“Well, when you put it like that, I suppose I’ll tell you,” Draco whispered. “I put that I was no one.”

Harry looked at him. He had been expecting a typical Draco response or something stupid he thought up specifically to let Johnson know exactly what he thought of her subject or something that made clear his superiority over everyone else. Clearly, at the beginning of the year, Harry did not know him very well yet and it hadn’t occurred to him that Draco’s problems hadn’t begun when he discovered them but had been there all along. 

“Are you going to say something or are you gonna keep looking at me like an idiot all afternoon?”

“I’m the one with self-esteem problems?” Draco shrugged. Harry came a little bit closer and took his hand. “You know that what you put is a lie, right? That you’re someone. You’re Draco.”

“Just Draco?” he asked with a smile. 

“And you’re perfect being just Draco.” Harry stretched up a bit and kissed Draco on the lips, trying to convey everything that he meant to him. 

When they finally separated, Draco said, “I think that it’s okay if you are just Harry, not Potter, not an idiot hero. Just you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading!! <3


End file.
